Friday, November 7, 2008 12:54 PM

Who Gets The Prime Offices?

By KEVIN FRIEDL

Among the many decisions facing President-elect Obama, seating assignments in the West Wing might seem to rank in importance somewhere between choosing his NASA administrator and deciding what type of dog to get his daughters.

But office space can mean a lot when a choice assignment means proximity to the most powerful office in the land. "Everybody wants to be close to the president," said Stephen Hess, a veteran White House staffer and expert on presidential transitions, in an interview with NationalJournal.com. "The president has to be very careful to make sure that the people around him are the people he needs the most."

The staffers a president chooses to keep close can say a lot about the priorities he hopes to set for his administration, as seen in the map below, which shows the layout of the Bush White House in mid-2005. Karl Rove, at the time senior adviser to President Bush, was situated just down the hall from the Oval Office, with both the the national security adviser and his deputy around the corner.